Pi.. Poor Planning Punishes Passengers

Unfortunately, as much as I love flying Delta, occasionally they do make mistakes. Two weeks ago was a howler......

It started with my flight out of PHL. Although evrything looked OK there, delays were being psoted for the ATL bound flights. Thunderstorms was the reason given, and normally I do not worry too much because all flights get messed up, including the connecting flights. But to be on the safe side I decided to ask whether I could go standby on the flight which is scheduled to leave one hour before my flight. This actually occurred just as they announced that my flight, a commuter jet, was delayed by a couple of hours, making it leave at least 30 minutes after the previous flight, instead of one hour before.

Much to my surprise I was called up for the new flight, but ended up with a middle seat fairly far back. Little did I know how much I would regret that decision. We finally leave the gate, and then spend forever on the taxiway. All the time I am looking at the time, and doing caculations to see if I would make the revised departure time (delayed) of my connecting flight.

As we landed at ATL, I checked my clock and then immediately called up the flight status for my connection. According to the website, the flight was still on the ground with a departure scheduled 15 minuets later. As it was departing from a gate close our our arrival gate I began to hope that I might be lucky this evening. We taxied over to the concourse, then the pilot cam on and said that our gate was still occupied, but that the other aircraft was loaded and would be pushing back very shortly. To cut a long story short, we stood outside the gate for a full hour after our arrival.

In the meanwhile, using my PDA with its Internet connection I was able to see that my connection flight left about 15 minutes after we should/could have deplaned. Adding insult to injury, while waiting I found out that the flight home before my connection was delayed even more, and I could have made that one, if we had not sat outside the gate for so long.

I understand, or at least try to understand, when airline operations fall to pieces because of weather conditions. But in this case I feel that Delta made a really stupid mistake by not arraning an alternative gate. This would of saved a number of passengers an unexpected night in Atlanta.

While Delta was probably claiming 'weather conditions' so not taking any responsibility for overnight expenses, if I had not been so tired (it was after all after midnight by the time we deplaned, I think we could have had an argument that it was not the weather, but poor planning and execution of their bad weather procedures that forced us to miss our flights.

The final mix-up occurred next morning, when I checked in for my 'replacement' flight. The evening before, on my way to the hotel, I had called Special Member Services to complain that I had bee rebooked on a 10:30 am flight next day. I was told all the earlier flights were full and that this was the first confirmed seat they could offer me. I asked to be placed on waitlist for the first flight (07:30 am), which was done. When I checked in in the morning, the selfservice machine just gave me a boarding pass for my 10:30 flight. Expecting a seat request for the 7:30, I quickly went to the Crown Room and asked why I was not listed for the 07:30. The agent checked everything for me and found that there was a single seat, at the back of the plane but aisle. The good news was that, now being confirmed in a seat, I was eligible fo the upgrade list. Given how busy things were, I did not even expect to get the upgrade, but my luck had turned. So there was at least one glimmer of sunshine in my trip.

But seriously Delta, please try harder and plan better.